Can H1N1 flu kill people? The 1918 flu code that has been frozen for a century

During the Spring Festival, Taiwanese celebrity Big S died suddenly from influenza, and this breaking news shocked the public. A friend asked me, why can influenza kill people?

Yes, influenza is not a disease similar to the cold as some people think. It has an indelible painful memory in human history.

Black memories from 1918

In March 1918, a cook in a military camp in Kansas, USA, collapsed with a sore throat and a low-grade fever, and then the entire camp was quickly engulfed by influenza. This plague, initially mistakenly called the "Spanish flu," spread like wildfire around the world, killing 50 to 100 million people in just 18 months, which may exceed the total death toll of the two world wars. Soldiers on the German and French fronts coughed up blood in the trenches, body bags piled up on the streets of Philadelphia, and entire Eskimo villages in Alaska were exterminated. This disaster even rewrote the course of history to some extent. Due to the sharp decline in troops, the First World War also came to an abrupt end that year. When the epidemic mysteriously disappeared in 1920, people still didn't know what had attacked them, and the complete genetic code of the pathogen disappeared, leaving only a huge gap in medical history.

Viral archaeology: a time capsule in the frozen soil

In 1997, Swedish pathologist Johan Hultin accidentally read the latest research on the pathogen of the 1918 influenza by American scientist Jeff Taubenberger, which reminded him of a study he had worked hard on when he was young. In 1951, in order to complete his doctoral research, Hultin excavated the remains of people who died of the 1918 influenza pandemic in the permafrost of Alaska. Although samples of lung tissue from the deceased were successfully obtained at that time, due to technical limitations and the lack of PCR technology at that time, the virus could not be successfully replicated, and the research was unsuccessful. More than 40 years later, the two scientists got in touch, and with the encouragement of Taubenberger, the 76-year-old Hultin once again set foot on Brevig, Alaska, and extracted samples from the lungs of an Eskimo female remains in the frozen soil at minus 30 degrees. Soon after, Taubenberger's laboratory confirmed that Hultin's expedition was a success. The permafrost samples from Alaska helped him complete the last screen, basically confirming that the pathogen of the Spanish flu was the influenza A (H1N1) virus. In 2005, Terrence Tumpey's team at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published their results, and they revived the virus in the laboratory!

echo

At this point in the story, we realize that the 1918 flu virus has not disappeared. After that outbreak, many people became immune to the original virus, but it has also continued to change and evolve, lurking around us for more than a hundred years. There is a small peak of flu almost every autumn and winter, and there are always a few people who become seriously ill and struggle to fight it in the ICU.

The scientist who discovered it, Taubenberg, said: "You can still find genetic traces of the 1918 virus in the seasonal influenza viruses circulating today. Every human infection with influenza A originates from the 1918 influenza outbreak."